How do we think about consuming art or products of people accused of sexual abuse?

Withdrawing on an accusation imposes a penalty no process has established

Question: How do we think about consuming art or products of people accused of sexual abuse?
Position1 of 2›: Consuming art or products of people accused of sexual abuse is ok
Argument‹2 of 2: Withdrawing on an accusation imposes a penalty no process has established

The argument

A second argument for this position concerns the evidential standing of an accusation. Proponents observe that the question is framed around people who are accused, and that accusations differ enormously: some are tested and upheld, some are tested and rejected, many are never tested at all. An audience has access to none of that machinery. What it has is reporting, which is partial by nature, and an impression of how serious a matter sounds. Proponents argue that making consumption conditional on allegations therefore installs a penalty with no finding behind it. The ordinary relationship runs the other way: a process establishes what happened, and consequences follow from what it establishes. A norm in which economic consequences arrive at the accusation and are not reviewed afterwards inverts that order, and inverts it asymmetrically, because withdrawal is easy to begin and has no mechanism for being undone. Proponents hold that this is not a defence of anyone's conduct but a point about who is equipped to judge it. They add that the costs of the inverted order fall unevenly. People with resources and representation can withstand a period of lost demand; those without cannot, and the same allegation can therefore end one career and inconvenience another. Proponents conclude that an audience's appropriate posture is to support the processes that can establish what happened — and to treat their findings as decisive when they arrive — rather than to administer consequences in advance of them. Consuming the work in the meantime is on this view not indifference to the allegation but a recognition that an audience is not the body that resolves it.

Premises

[P1]Accusations vary widely in whether they have been tested and in what any test concluded. [P2] Audiences have no access to the processes that could establish which is which, only to partial reporting. [P3] A norm of withdrawal on accusation therefore imposes economic consequences with no finding behind them, and provides no means of reversal if a finding later exonerates. [C] Consuming the work is acceptable, because administering consequences is the business of processes equipped to make findings rather than of audiences.

Counter-arguments

Critics answer that the argument demands a standard of proof appropriate to punishment for a decision that is not a punishment: declining to buy something is a choice about one's own money, not a sanction requiring due process. A second objection is that waiting for findings is in practice a decision to carry on indefinitely, since most allegations of this kind are never formally resolved, and a principle whose effect is permanent inaction is doing less work than it claims. Others note that the appeal to process sits awkwardly with how these cases arise, as formal routes are often unavailable precisely because of the imbalance of power the allegations concern.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] Audiences routinely assess contested claims with imperfect information, in politics and in commerce alike, and incomplete knowledge does not usually bar them from acting on a judgement. [Rejecting P3] Declining to buy something is not a penalty requiring a finding, since nobody is entitled to anyone's custom, and framing a consumer choice as a sanction imports a standard that does not apply to it. [Rejecting C] Deferring to processes amounts to indefinite consumption in practice, because most such allegations are never formally resolved, which makes the position a decision disguised as a deferral.